Gaming For The Week 4th - 10th April 2010

Ben was available this week so it left Ivan, Jo and I to trade blows over AGoT LCG. While waiting for Jo, I had an opportunity to customize a Lannistar deck for play but as it turned out, a 60 card deck with few income producing locations and high cost characters was a rather bad combo.

Jo played Targayen while Ivan opted for Greyjoy which seems to have usurped Stark as his fav house. The game started with us closely matched but Ivan blew it open in the 7th and 8th rounds, playing the Rise of the Kraken plot card consecutively. That is a claim 2 card with an extra power token for each unopposed challenge. Yup, it plays as strong as it sounds. He was basically unstoppable especially with the ridiculous inititive of 8 on that plot card too. He picked us apart and romper to victory with Jo and I still at single digit power tokens.

Is Rise of the Kraken overpowered? Probably but perhaps not extremely so that it warrents a ban. Nonetheless, I do wish that the initiative wasn't so ridiculously high that the Greyjoy player not only gets free pick of the titles but also starts the attack. I figure that the other players need to pin down the Greyjoy player early in the game in preparation for the big swing when that plot card comes into play, possibly in 2 consecutive rounds.

The Lannistar deck I played with still needs tweaking. Hopefully I'll have a chance to do so next week.

We ended off with Hansa Teutonica which Van joined us for. This game just continues to shine. I went hard for actions from the get-go, being first to 5. Racked up a nice number of bonus markers too as the flips were attractive, contributing to my score.

I really have no major complains about the game. It IS abstract but doesn't feel that way like true abstract games in the vein of Ingenious and Blokus. The abstractness of Taj Mahal got to me but this one hardly bothers me one bit. I'm seriously thinking of taking my rating up to a 10 on this one.

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